


always a godmother, never a god

by anothercover



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Has No Filter, Clint Barton's Farm, Dirty Talk, F/M, Oral Sex, Outdoor Sex, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Unresolved Romantic Tension, which is very refreshing tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 19:02:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12115173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: “I know you love him,” James says.Natasha nods. She’s never denied that. Not to James, anyway.“I also know that I don’t know how to not want you. I see you across any room and I think about kissing you til my mouth bruises. Peeling off your clothes a piece at a time, like a present. I see you and I thinkmine.”





	always a godmother, never a god

**Author's Note:**

> Title shamelessly stolen from a Gilmore Girls episode. Apparently I remembered how to write porn! It just took an anxiety spiral, a delayed flight, two airport vodka-sodas, and Portugal The Man's "Feel It Still" on repeat.

  
  
Natasha has long believed that Laura’s optimism is a thing that occasionally borders on pathological. A perfect example of which is the fact that she invited the entire team to the farm for Nate’s christening, a few months after his second birthday. 

It’s not entirely Laura’s fault that she doesn’t understand what a monumentally terrible idea this was. She understands the _concept_ of the group dynamics in play here, and she understand that there are giant problems, massive tension bordering on outright hatred. But if Clint and Natasha have relayed stories, she’s still never spent any real amount of time with any of these people, which means there’s no way she could understand this particular personality cocktail on a level other than theoretical. 

Laura lives in a world where social conventions are actually followed. She lives in a world where problems can be solved if the players involved address them like adults. Open acknowledgement. Conversation. Compromise. 

And – although it feels mean to think it, and Natasha doesn’t like to be mean about this, but it’s also the truth – Laura lives her life in a world that’s really just _not that complicated_. 

Which is probably part of the reason her marriage is crumbling. 

Natasha has been doing an excellent job of pretending she hasn’t noticed what’s going on over the last few days; she can follow the rules, too. Clint will say something about it when he’s ready to say something about it.

The point here is the social convention of it all: if a group of people aren’t speaking, the first step is to get them to speak. If they won’t take the initiative themselves, that’s what a compulsory social occasion is for – breaking the ice. There is nothing more compulsory than an event involving a child. No one will want to come, but every single one of them will show up. 

And Laura seems to genuinely believe that this can all be solved if everyone will just take that first step and get in a room together. 

This was supposed to be a peace offering. Leipzig is supposed to be so far behind all of them that the only thing needed is a gentle nudge.

It took approximately eighty-seven minutes for Tony to punch Steve in the jaw, eighty-nine for Sam to belt Tony in the gut, and ninety-one for Clint to make a shitty little comment to Laura about it. Some stuff happened in the minutes after that, but that was the point Natasha checked out. 

She had already filled all duties expected of a godmother, got Nate changed into play clothes, and told Lila to knock it off with the brownies before she could make herself sick: responsibilities complete. She was letting herself off the hook. There was no point in trying to save a group of adult men from themselves; they were going to do what they were going to do. 

At some point in the last two years, she had finally realized that slamming her body against a brick wall was only ever going to break one thing, and it would not be the wall.

She leaves it to collapse down around itself, grabs an egg salad sandwich from the buffet table, and walks off to eat it in the apple orchard. Behind her, she can hear a table being flipped over. There’s a lot of clattering, wood cracking. More yelling. 

She still doesn’t look back.

*

James comes to find her a little while later. Natasha’s reclining in a tree, surprisingly comfortable in the crook between two overlapping thick branches. The sunlight’s filtering through the canopy of blossoms and she’s been pitching tiny pieces of her sandwich crust to some scattered bluebirds. It’s been very peaceful.

“You know, I may stay up here all night. Climbing in this dress wasn’t easy,” she tells him. 

“Bet you made it look that way,” he says, and holds his hand up, reaching for her in the branches. She can see a little bit of blood spatter on his lapels. “Come on. There’s a cease-fire.”

“Casualty report?”

“Handful of black eyes and bloody noses, a little property damage, a lot of bruised egos,” he says. “Some crying.”

“Is it wrong that I sort of hope it was Steve?”

“Your guy’s wife.”

James says it so easily that it startles her into taking his hand. She doesn’t need the help, really, but his fingers curl around hers and he swings her to the ground like it’s a foxtrot. It makes her want to follow the rest of the steps.

He keeps his hand at her waist. Maybe it’s a dance to him, too. 

“Nice lady,” he adds. “Bad plan today. Also really bad marriage, but she’s a nice lady.”

“Is it that obvious?” Natasha says. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s picked up on it, too. He’s always been observant, but it’s magnified over the last year. Nothing escapes James Barnes. He’s the first person she’s ever met who is entirely on her level in that area. Which is another thing that shouldn’t come as a surprise; the two of them were always a perfect match. Like herself and Clint, in a lot of ways. From the very beginning, they had kind of chemistry that couldn’t be faked, in the field or off it. It’s there or it’s not.

She has a very clearly defined type.

“I know Hawkeye a little bit by now. Seeing this place - she wants to be married to a person he’s never gonna be, and it runs both ways,” James says, as though he hasn’t just met Laura, as though this isn’t the first time he’s ever seen them as a couple. Like he’s observed this over years the same way Natasha has. “But they’ve got kids. They might not figure out that they’d be happier apart.”

He leans in to kiss her at the same time as she turns up to find his mouth; a fluid, instinctive moment. A compatible kiss that would convince any passerby that they’ve been sharing easy kisses for lifetimes. 

It’s been happening more and more lately, this kind of kissing. Never anything beyond it, always in moments when it’s felt natural, and with no discussion about what they’re doing or where it could lead. She can’t even remember how it started.

She does, however, know exactly how strange this would look from the outside. She wouldn’t have a reasonable way to articulate it if anyone ever asked what the hell they were doing. 

Only that kissing James has never _not_ made sense to her. 

“I wish they would, though. I hate watching it hurt you,” he tells her.

She feels her eyebrows twitch as her body tenses; involuntary responses. “I’m fine, James.”

“You just don’t like it when you’re not fine,” he says, with his characteristic bluntness. “You love him too much to be _that_ okay, Nat.”

He modulates that bluntness with other people. Never with her. In the last year, since he woke up from the ice with the full Natasha Romanoff memory collection reinstalled, locked and loaded and back where she belonged, they’ve only ever known how to be one way with each other. 

It was the only way that wouldn’t have killed both of them.

“Now I’m worried that _I’ve_ gotten obvious,” she says, exhaling on a sigh. “I never used to be.”

James shrugs. “I know you, that’s all.” He looks around as though he’s just started clocking their surroundings – the acres of white-blossomed trees, the barn off to the north and the sprawling house laid out just west of it. Everything’s green and new in the spring. “Is this something you want? This kind of life, I mean. You’re different when you’re here. You sort of – you do this thing where you try harder to seem like someone else, and usually I wouldn’t be able to see behind the curtain when you do that.”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t think so, not really. But it gets muddled sometimes. It’s hard to float around normalcy without really touching it. I think that’s the only reason I get wistful.”

“If you really want a couple kids of your own, I’m more than happy to volunteer my services.”

She snorts. “I bet you are.”

He reaches out to trace his fingers down her cheek. Her skin feels hot against his; when his thumb passes over her lower lip, she tests her teeth against it, lightly.

“I know you love him,” James says. 

Natasha nods. She’s never denied that. Not to James, anyway.

“I also know that I don’t know how to not want you. I see you across any room and I think about kissing you til my mouth bruises. Peeling off your clothes a piece at a time, like a present. I see you and I think _mine_.”

A shiver streaks up her spine, entirely without her permission. “I don’t belong to anyone but myself,” she snaps, but something in her throat aches: there is a part of her that she can’t stamp out, soft and weak and mewling, that whispers _it might be nice, though. To belong to someone, too, wouldn’t it? Isn’t that why you tried to make it stick with Banner? If you don’t belong_ here, _wouldn’t it be nice to know there was still somewhere –_

“Natalia, I _know_ ,” James says, unperturbed. His eyes have gone dark in a way they’ve only ever hinted at holding. “It’s an absolute bullshit thing to think, but I don’t know how to make it go away. Not sure I really want to, either. I remember every single noise I got you to make, but I can’t remember what you taste like. Lost a lot of hours imagining learning, though.”

He’s inched her up against he back of the tree; she didn’t even realize they’ve been moving. He’s big and solid and so real, a wall of muscle with his body against hers, worsening the wrinkles in his sharply cut suit. She can smell the bite of his aftershave even though he’s not fooling anyone; it’s visibly been at least three days since a razor came anywhere near that stubble. 

He’s filling all her senses and she should tell him to stop – they’re at a _christening_ , even with everything much worse that’s happened today, even though there’s no way anyone will see them out here. She should tell him to stop because this is a grossly unfair way for her to behave. 

She is so helplessly attracted to him.

They have always been so helplessly attracted to each other.

His big hands settle heavily on her hips. He holds them there like he’s memorizing the curves, and she thinks, for a moment, that this is the place they’ll hit the brakes. Another inch they’ll tack onto these months of scattershot kisses, still unsure if they’re moving in a real direction at all.

Then he starts dragging her skirt up her thighs. 

“James,” she gasps, which is weak if it’s supposed to pass for a protest, because her hands are fisted in the grey fabric of his suit jacket, twisting, pulling, making the wrinkles worse. 

He’s undeterred. “I want to see your cunt again,” he says – it’s made twice as filthy by that same bluntness, and a wet groan bursts from her chest as she wriggles against him.

This was always a language they knew. When they couldn’t even have simple conversations, there was still this electric heartbeat between them. A pulsating bass that only knew how to thrum one note, _this is right. Even without words, something here is right_. They spent so much time desperate to show it when they didn’t know how to say it, had never been taught or told. 

She’s held onto all of it. His fingers stroking through her hair when it was long, his slow hard-won smiles. The day he remembered his name beyond _Soldier_ and gave it to her as a gift, to use only when they were alone. How she had carried this crackling fire inside her and how it brought her life into _bright_. What it had felt like to know something outside the work for the first time, to have something that was only hers – 

For so long, James couldn’t access those memories. She had forced herself not to hope that he would: she could carry it for the both of them without letting that diminish the value it once held. 

But now he remembers. And the want hasn’t faded. A chance for something real exists for them now, the possibility of everything they never got to have stretching out in front of them, and she is still – 

In love with Clint Barton. 

That’s what she’s _still_.

Her body remembers, though. Her body doesn’t care what kind of gridlock her heart is stalled in. James’s memories came back and dragged her physical responses along with them, and now she is soaking all the way through her underwear because of the familiarity – not just the touch, but the situation, the two of them sneaking off to steal something that will belong only to them, the way they always used to.

He’s shoved her skirt up all the way around her hips and gone to his knees in front of her. 

In the orchard, for fuck’s sake, out in the open, he’ll have telltale grass stains on his pants, but when she tries to say so, his teeth close around the damp cotton at the apex and he jerks his head once, sharply – 

He rips her panties open with his fucking _teeth_ and she’s keening before he presses what feels like his entire face against her cunt, as though he’s trying to drown himself inside her. His stubble scrapes rough on the inside of her thighs; when she tries to clamp them together, he slaps an open palm against the side of her ass in admonishment, hard enough to force enough another choked cry from her. 

It’s better than she remembered. 

Has she forgotten that sex could be this way?

Her legs are spread wide as he eats her from beneath, nothing gentle in him but nothing urgent, either. Skates his lips along her folds, up, down, across before pushing his tongue between and licking her open – his thumbs dig into her hipbones with her skirt bunched up beneath them, there will be bruises and it makes her impossibly wetter.

Her eyes are open, nothing before her but blue skies and puffy white clouds and James’s greedy mouth sucking her cunt to his own satisfaction before even turning his attention to her clit.

Her shaking hands settle in his hair and he hums against her that sounds approving and when she can bring herself to look down at him, a needy, wordless little wail spills from her lips before she can call it back.

It’s so breathtakingly intimate. She _loves_ this, she has always loved this, and for all she hasn’t lived like a nun, there’s been no one she’s trusted enough to let them go down on her since James. The excuses were always so readily available, but this is the truth: she likes it too much, it renders her too vulnerable, it is too easy to pull her guard down with a tongue worrying her clit and those wet hungry noises and her eyes are _watering_ with the thrill of it. 

When she comes, his head cupped in her hands as she forces him more tightly against her, riding herself against his tongue and panting, it would be a disappointment to come to the end if it didn’t also send white-gold explosions off behind her eyes.

James drags her down into the grass with him and pulls her onto his chest. She’s still slick between her legs, dizzy with want and thrumming against him as he slides her underwear off entirely, now little more than a useless circle of elastic with dangling fabric attached. He tucks them into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and it punches a wheezy laugh out of her.

“Keeping a trophy?” she says. “You’re such a braggart.”

“When it’s something worth bragging about, yes m’am,” he says unrepentantly, and licks his lips. It sends a pleased little aftershock sparking through her, fluttering low in her stomach. 

_I don’t know if I’m ready_ , she thinks.

Banner was something else entirely; a mathematical equation, in its way. Two lonely people who enjoyed each other’s company, who liked each other very much, who always had a pleasant time together. Who could never truly hurt each other because they could never be in it deep enough. 

They could have been content, though. They would have been kind to each other. Sometimes kindness could be enough.

James Barnes is not Bruce Banner. 

This would not be soft, contented companionship. This is something real and raw and enormous; if they dive into this, it will be _everything_. It will not be small pieces, it will lay them bare in their entirety to each other. It won’t be a footnote. It will be the whole book.

 _I don’t know if I’m ready, but I’m trying to meet you where you are,_ she thinks. 

_If I come to you, I want to give you my whole self instead of this fragmented version,_ she thinks.

 _You aren’t the only one who thinks about what we could be,_ she thinks.

She doesn’t have to say so. The understanding between them is sometimes frightening.

He rolls his hips beneath her, a slow suggestion. He’s hard against her leg. “Ride me,” he suggests. “You’re beautiful when you ride me.”

“I am, aren’t I?” she says, and opens his pants without hesitation.

*

There is no way to make it look like they’ve been doing anything but what they’ve been doing when they walk back to the house, so they don’t try to disguise it. His clothes are a mess of damp grass stains and the shredded white petals are hopelessly obvious in the red tangles of her hair.

Steve gapes at them like an actual cartoon character: goggle-eyed, jaw hanging open. 

“This is the least fair thing in the world,” Sam mutters.

“Shut your mouth,” James says brusquely, which could apply to either of them. “And then go inside so you can apologize to Mrs. Barton once more before we clear out. Profusely.”

They do what he says, walking towards the house with minimal grumbling. James lifts her hand and busses a quick kiss to her knuckles before following after them. Presumably to supervise their apologies; he’s got very strict standards for that sort of thing.

Natasha smooths out her skirt as Clint comes to stand at her side. She doesn’t need to look down to know that his hands are balled into fists, the veins in his arms likely bulging right along with them. 

“So – forgetting about a thousand other things I could bring up because we’re gonna circle around to them later,” he says, his voice low enough that it won’t carry and no less furious for the volume, “let’s start with what the fuck you could possibly be thinking.”

“Don’t start,” she says. 

“No, no, I’m talking right now. Odessa. How about we start with Odessa? I think Odessa’s probably the place I want to kick off,” he says. 

His litany is long, almost as though he’s been stockpiling it for just such an occasion, angry and disbelieving and _jealous hurt_ underscoring all of it. She gives him a few minutes to air some of it, just to burn off a little of the pressure, and then interrupts him in the middle of a sentence about party etiquette. 

“I’m not going to wait forever, Clint.”

Clint goes entirely still. She turns her head to look at him, finally. Meets his eyes straight-on, sees the way his mouth is tight at the corners and his eyes silently begging her to keep this in the place they have always kept it: buried so deep that they can only access it when it’s a _need_.

“I can’t,” she says. “So how about you finally make up your mind before you ask me to do the same?”

“Natasha,” he says, but he doesn’t seem to know what words come after her name. 

“Let me know when you do,” she tells him, and turns to follow the crowd up the porch steps, into the house. 

  


.end.


End file.
